Mourning the Passing of a Household Icon

Start Writing the Eulogies for Print Encyclopedias discusses what most of us probably already know, that the 'old-fashioned' encyclopedias of yore are being replaced by "the online hearth", Wikipedia and the like. In the 1970's, I remember using our huge brown simulated leather-bound Encyclopedia Britannica and the current edition (blue covers) of the World Book Encyclopedia to begin researching my various school 'reports': Mexico, the La Brea tar pits, the human body; they all started with these wonderful sources of, what seemed like an infinite amount of information. Now my 11 year old son starts all his research with Wikipedia and probably ends it there too, to my dismay. I always ask him what books he used, but his response is that it's too hard to find books in his school library. If I had more time, I'd be taking him more often to the public library to search the catalog (which he does know how to do!). This article mentions a Wikipedia alternative, (only however for topics in the natural sciences) that I have never heard of before. The Encyclopedia of Life was started by a Harvard biologist who has been joined by a team of international scientists: "It sounds surreal, and yet scientists are writing the Book of All Species. Or to be more precise, they are building a Web site called the Encyclopedia of Life (www.eol.org). On Thursday its authors, an international team of scientists, will introduce the first 30,000 pages, and within a decade, they predict, they will have the other 1.77 million." (http://tinyurl.com/2rwlef) The researchers want to make the site useful to scientists and non-scientists, so they are creating a sliding button that readers can move to decide how much detail they want about the topic. The EOL is certainly a very interesting concept but obviously an extremely ambitious project. I kind of miss our old Britannica set. They are still available for purchase, although they are being marketed quite differently. Britannica wants people to think of the many volumes as a "luxury experience. You want to be able to produce a lot of joy, a paper joy.” I just don't get that same sense of "joy" from Wikipedia.

New resources help engineers

By Roddy MacLeod, Librarian at Herriot-Watt University Library in Edinburgh, Scotland. Updates regarding new journal titles, developments in publisher's access and technology offerings. Originally published in February/March issue of Research Information. http://www.researchinformation.info/features/feature.php?feature_id=161

The Librarian Song - Check out his facial expressions!

ACRL is proud to announce the 2008 award winners:

Division Award Winners Excellence in Academic Libraries Award (Donor: Blackwell’s Book Services) University: McMaster University Libraries, Hamilton, Ontario College: Laurence McKinley Gould Library at Carleton College, Northfield, Minn. (My Alma Mater!) Community College: Shatford Library at Pasadena City College, Pasadena, Calif. Academic/Research Librarian of the Year Award (Donor: YBP Library Services) Peter Hernon, Simmons College Samuel Lazerow Fellowship (Donor: Thomson Scientific) Ping Situ, University of Arizona, and Shuyong Jiang, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, for their research project on vendor-provided records and the experience of a research library in outsourcing cataloging service for its Chinese language materials, including its backlogs Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (Donor: Thomson Scientific) Donghua Tao, University of Missouri - Columbia School of Information Science & Learning Technology, for her proposal, “Using Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) in Understanding Selection and Use of Information Resources: An Information Resource Selection and Use Model”